Need stairway gate advice

[Rachels]

We have a wall on one side and a banister on the other. The problem is that there's molding at the base of the wall which goes up the stairs. Can we attach a gate to the molding at the base and the wall at the top, even though there's a .5" difference? How is this done?

-Rachel
Mom to Abigail Rose
5/18/02

[nigele]

We just dealt with a similar issue. We bought the Kidco Beechwood Gate and two installation kits. The installatin kits include a long strip of wood that attaches vertically to your wall and/or bannister so you can securely screw in the gate. We have molding at the base of our wall but also a hand rail that is attached to a strip of wood that runs up the length of the stairs, so we when we attached the installation kit, it was even. If you don't have the same configuration (a strip of wood behind the hand rail) you can get a .5" piece of wood to attach at the top of the installation kit, which would even everything out. Does this make sense? My Dad is really handy and installed our gate when he was visiting - I was convinced the gate would not work since the hardware on the hand rail was too low but he worked it out. Let me know if you want me to e-mail a picture to you - I know it is really confusing to explain in words!

Good luck...

[KathyO]

We got the Evenflo Secure Solutions gate, and did exactly what you describe with the piece of wood between gate and wall to balance off the moulding at the bottom. Evenflo explicitly says not to do this, but we measured the baby and measured the gap and decided it was still a safe thing. It turned out to have the added advantage that the cats use this ever-so-slightly-wider gap to go through the gate, even though DD can't, and can't fit any significant portion of her anatomy through it either.

Best,

KathyO

[schums]

We got the Safety first gate that is white metal with a knob to "push and turn" to open the gate. This gate actually comes with a spacer to deal with just the situation you're talking about. We really like the gate, even though I was worried it would be a pain to use.

Let me know if you need more info on the gate. We got it a BRU.

Sarah

[michlee]

We also have the same configuration you describe. We bought one installation kit for the banister side so we wouldn't have to drill holes into our nice wood banister. (Although, my husband tells me the only items he used from the kit were a long skinny piece of wood and two plastic fasteners which are used to "tie" the stick to the banister. You can probably pick up the items at a hardware store instead of spending $15 on a kit.)

We didn't have to do anything special on the wall/molding side. The gate we used (the Kidco Safeway gage) enabled us to adjust the top and bottom widths seperately.

I highly recommend the Safeway gate. It works great.